realize the
Infinite. Then faintly she heard a man's voice singing. It seemed at
first a trick of the imagination. But nearer and nearer it came, in the
fellowship of life joyfully invading the solitude; and with a
readjustment of her faculties to the expected event, she watched the
point where the trail dipped on a sharp turn of grade.

Above it rose a cowpuncher hat, then a silk shirt with a string tie, and
after that a sage baggage burro with clipped ears, a solemn-faced pony,
and an Indian. Jack was watching his steps in the uneven path, and not
until the full length of him had appeared and he was flush on the level
with her did he look up.

She was leaning back, her weight partly poised on the flat of her hand
on the rock, revealing the full curve of throat and the soft sweep of
the lines of her slim figure, erect, her head thrown back, her face in
shadow with the sun behind playing in her hair, in half-defiant
readiness. She saw him as the spirit of travel--its ease, mystery,
unattachedness--which had spanned the distances between her and the
horizon, in the freedom of his wandering choice. His low-pitched
exclamation of surprise was vibrant with appreciation of the picture she
made, and he stood quite still in a second's wistful silence, waiting on
her first word after the lapse of the many days since he had brought a
look of horror into her eyes.

"Hello, Jack!" she said in the old tone of comradeship. It struck a spark
electrifying him with all his old, happy manner.

He swept off his hat with a grand bow, blinking in the blaze of the sun
which turned his tan to a bronze and touched the smile, which was born as
an inspiration from her greeting, with radiance.

"Hello to you, Mary, guarding the pass to Little Rivers!" he said
exultantly. "You are just the person I wanted to see. I have been in
a hurry to tell you about a certain thing ever since it came to me
this morning."

She guessed that he was about to make up a new story. He must have had
time for many inventions in the ten days of his absence. But she welcomed
any tangent of nonsense that set the right key for the coincidence of
their meeting. She had refused to ride to the pass with him and here they
were alone together on the pass. Three or four steps, so light that they
seemed to be irresistibly winning permission from her, and he had sat
down on another flat-topped rock close by. Firio and the baggage train
moved on up the trail methodically an